61–70 of 72 posts
I think it's telling that his first hypothesis for why Barnes & Noble was getting more positive reviews was that they were paying for them. Honestly, my first thought was "maybe they're just asking more customers". I wonder if he thought that the competitor was doing something shady because he'd been put on the spot and so his first response was instinctively the most defensive one.
Ah, the "myth" of Jeff Bezos. I only "met" him twice, in the hallways of PacMed, back when Amazon's workforce was so tiny compared to now. I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc. Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to sho…
I think it's telling that his first hypothesis for why Barnes & Noble was getting more positive reviews was that they were paying for them. Honestly, my first thought was "maybe they're just asking more customers". I wonder if he thought that the competitor was doing something shady because he'd been put on the spot and so his first response was instinctively the most defensive one.
He mentioned several times that asking for reviews wasn't common (in his opinion) at the time, and so there's little else that could reasonably explain the jump in review count.
This PM seems like an A-player, but he was caught flat footed, hence the "?"
The "?" email means you dropped a ball. If I were doing an armchair RCA on it, I'd posit the problem was a disconnect in the relationship between Product and Marketing, where marketing would have already known they were getting hammered on reviews - and that they mattered - but Product was probably indexed on the wrong stakeholders, likely in the engineering org given, a) that the PM could code at all meant eng was still his comfort zone, and b) the focus on being seen to ship a release. My read of it was he dropped the ball because he backed the wrong horse and misunderstood the priorities of the company. Of course you drop everything to fix it, you f'd up.
Unfortunately, just sending "?" emails to staff doesn't create the culture where they are meaningful. Sending "?" messages doesn't make you Jeff Bezos. I'd argue they are an artifact of a very specific local culture in AMZN. If managers in other orgs imitated that aspect of it, thinking now they're doing the real Bezo-ing, they would be just doing a cargo cult management ritual.
Ah, the "myth" of Jeff Bezos. I only "met" him twice, in the hallways of PacMed, back when Amazon's workforce was so tiny compared to now. I was at AWS, 2008-2014. In the early days, Bezos would frequently comment on AWS-related stuff, such as daily EC2 revenues, etc. Occasionally, despite I wasn't an executive back then, I would also be one of the tens of email recipients that angry Amazon customers would use to sho…
I think you nailed it -that's why Amazon is a success..a culture where brilliant people working crazy hours for little reward (now).. obv that gets harder to translate when you have thousands of employees...
Doesn't seem like they sleep on the street either. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You spell out your question like a human being, to treat the other human being with respect.
I agree with you 100% The larger issue is that Jeff's subordinates will then treat their subordinates in the same way. If this becomes common, it will extend to other behavior or communication. This will result in horrible company culture, where bosses treat their underlings like shit. Do not normalize this type of behavior! That is not good for employee retention, nor employee productivity/morale. It all comes from…
At this point in the App Store cycle, most app developers I know would aggressively "review flush". It sounds like the OP wasn't familiar with the growth strategies common at the time. If your star average goes below 4.5, put out a quickie point release. That would reset the reviews, and the review prompt would drive a 5 star instantly. IIRC, I'd also divide all the users into buckets, and stage out review prompts by…
That's a funny thing to say, because as a user all I ever want from online reviews is the negative reviews stacked together. Positive reviews are only noise, in the way. The only question is what sort of negative reviews are there?
Strategizing as you describe is depressing to me because it suggests the public mostly uses reviews in the wrong way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you 100% The larger issue is that Jeff's subordinates will then treat their subordinates in the same way. If this becomes common, it will extend to other behavior or communication. This will result in horrible company culture, where bosses treat their underlings like shit. Do not normalize this type of behavior! That is not good for employee retention, nor employee productivity/morale. It all comes from…
I'm no fan of Amazon, but it's the third most valuable company on the planet. Whatever they're doing is obviously working for them, even if I personally wouldn't want to work there.
I still can't downvote on HN but if I could, i'd downvote this.
Probably all due to the stifling effect of a single character email
I do get it though, in my own company we constantly compare ourselves to the competitor, but we never actually do a competitor analysis, it's like we're scared or something to use their product.